Where the wild things are

As climate change and biological invasions continue to impact global biodiversity, scientists at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado-Boulder have recently published work that suggests that the way organisms move to new areas, or range expansion, can be impacted directly by evolutionary changes. Their work, published in Nature Communications, challenges the traditional theory that only demographics such as birth, death and migration determine range expansions. The researchers’ findings add evolutionary processes, which occur during the course of a range expansion, as determining factors.